<p>I can speak to this, having had a long association with the University of Chicago and a son who chose Dartmouth.
Part of the Dartmouth ethos is to be friendly and unpretentious. That doesn’t imply automatic intellectual conversations over lunch. However, the population at Dartmouth isn’t like that at your high school. Intellectual conversation will be respected and engaged in, so long as it doesn’t take the form of one-up-man-ship, such as “I understand post-war French intellectuals better than you do”. These are smart people ready to be stimulated. I’d say don’t worry if you have an intellectual bent.
I have found that the “other side of the coin” on college intellectualism is much misunderstood. I can give the example of two recent University of Chicago undergraduates I have worked with. For one gal, the high point of the year was a national conference where people dress up as their favorite super heroes from the cartoon world. Another young woman knew every line from every episode of the late, great “Golden Girls” TV series. My son took a road trip to Cornell one weekend, where he found many students engaged in computer games. None of these experiences would typically happen at Dartmouth, though they could.
Dartmouth is just a very social place.</p>